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A Rolling Coup
Oct 13 2013 @ 9:20pm
How else do you explain this amendment to the following rule passed by the House just before it shut down the government:
So, in advance, the GOP changed parliamentary procedure to ensure that no clean resolution, based on a Senate budget agreement, could get on the floor of the House for a general vote. The hostage-takers made it impossible to defuse the bomb they have attached to our system of government without their consent – even against a majority of House members of both parties.
These people are deadly serious. Since they lost an election, they decided to start a cold civil war.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/13/a-rolling-coup/
This Is Where We Are
Oct 13 2013 @ 8:45pm
This is a fascinating speech from today’s rally at the World War II veterans’ memorial. It’s fascinating because it’s a riveting, candid insight into the forces that are behind the government shut-down and the debt-ceiling blackmail of the country and the world. They do not believe this president is a legitimate president. It is beyond their understanding that he was re-elected handily, or that he commands, even during this assault on our system of government, far more support than the Tea Party. Let’s not be mealy-mouthed. This speaker, Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, accuses the president of treason in this speech, of deliberately pursuing policies to kill members of the armed services, because he is an Islamist, and allegedly “bows to Allah”. What he is saying is the president is a deliberate mole of foreign agents determined to destroy the American way of life. And there is no pushback from the crowd and no pushback from GOP leaders.
This is what we’re dealing with. This is not an alternative budget; it is not another way of insuring millions and cutting healthcare costs; it is not a contribution to anything but to the logic of nullification of an election. It is yet another declaration of cold civil war – a call for a nonviolent refusal to be governed by a re-elected president because he is pursuing policies with which an electorally defeated minority disagree. Simply pursuing those policies has rendered Obama a “monarch” who is arguing “his way or the highway.” But all Obama is doing is implementing a campaign promise and settled law, while governing under a continuing resolution that reflects the sequester’s level of spending, a level agreed to by the Republicans. He wants a budget agreement between the House and Senate in a conference that the Republican House has long resisted entering. He has said that he is happy to negotiate with anyone on anything as long as the blackmail of a government shut-down and of a threatened global depression are ended. And his record shows that he has compromised again and again – as his own most fervent supporters look on in dismay.
I’m not privy to the negotiations now going on in the Senate and can only glean from outsiders what the meetings with legislators have been like. But I’m not distorting the raw facts of the situation here, or trying to distract from them. And I’d love a much more expansive Grand Bargain on taxes and entitlements, that could ease our long-term debt (but it would have to be a bargain, not merely a set of Republican demands). But the rank threats of unimaginably radical consequences if a re-elected president doesn’t junk what he was re-elected to do are so foul in their lack of concern about the common good, so poisonous in their slander of a president, and so contemptuous of our orderly system of government, that it is vital the threats do not work and are not accommodated. No president of any party has any right to legitimize such an attack on the American system of government and the way it conducts business – by elections, debates, compromises and budgets, not threats of total government shut-down and the collapse of the dollar if our global credit rating is effectively destroyed overnight.
I hoped we’d be nearing some kind of deal at this point, rather than witnessing this upping of the ante from the forces that truly live on the fringes of the far right, but which, without any resistance, have now defined the Republican party. It is no accident that among those addressing this rally to blackmail the country and the world were Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz. I can see a very powerful populist electoral ticket with both of those on it – either of a third Tea Party or of an even more radicalized GOP. And perhaps that is the only way to expunge this nihilist extremism from our system. Except that it may succeed in expunging the system and the economy before we can test it where in a democracy we are accustomed to test it: in elections, not in the chaos of economic blackmail.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/10/13/this-is-where-we-are/
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/389530476781649921/photo/1
October 13, 2013 8:08 PM
Was It Worth It?
By Martin Longman
Remember back when this government shutdown started and the Republicans had so many ambitions? They were going to defund ObamaCare, or at least delay the individual mandate for a year. They were going to introduce a “conscience clause” that would allow employers to deny their workers access to contraception. They were going to compel the administration to bypass the deliberative process at the State Department and preemptively license the Keystone XL pipeline. They were going to gut coal-ash regulations and expand offshore drilling. They were going to get fast track authority for tax reform legislation based on Rep. Paul Ryan’s principles. They were going to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and rip apart the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. They’d means-test Medicare and finally get tort reform. They had these dreams and many more besides.
But where are we now? All the various deals and negotiations have collapsed, and it’s down to a one-on-one between Reid and McConnell.
Translation: the talks are about how much new spending will be added to the sequester, how much the borrowing limit will be expanded, and how much time will be covered under the continuing resolution.
Further translation: the Republicans aren’t even asking for anything on their wish-list anymore.
Which is as it should be, because they never offered the Democrats a damn thing in return.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_10/was_it_worth_it047303.php
Tea Party Klan Rally flying confederate flags at the White House
Yeah, Sarah Palin’s stupid a$$ is right at home with these ignorant, racist, subhumans. I must say, however, that she’s hit the bottom.
the KKK
KaNuri @KaNuri
What makes me smile is knowing some racist wakes up every morning with a Black President and Black wife & daughters in the White House! :-)
5:30 PM – 13 Oct 2013
Nerdy Wonka @NerdyWonka
Republicans, you can wave one Confederate flag or 1000. When you wake up tomorrow, Barack Obama will still be President of the United States
5:25 PM – 13 Oct 2013
‘American Promise’ doc focuses on the education of black boys
by Todd Johnson | October 13, 2013 at 1:07 PM
It wasn’t easy – but Idris Brewster and Seun Summers made it through. The two teenagers made it through a difficult, challenge-filled journey to graduate high school.
And they made it through with cameras documenting their every move.
The two friends were the main characters in the documentary American Promise, which explores their lives in Brooklyn from kindergarten to high school graduation day.
Idris’ parents Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster are the film’s producers and directors. Both Idris and Seun, who are African-American, are admitted into the Dalton School, a prestigious private school on New York’s Upper East Side.
Both of the boy’s parents decide it’s an opportunity they cannot pass up – but also acknowledge there will be difficulties their sons face on issues of race and class.
How would Idris and Seun handle fitting into the culture of a mostly white prep school?
The answer is complex – which the film shows in situations varying from tragic to mundane. The documentary raises more questions than it provides answers:
Why do girls say no to Idris when he asks them to dance in middle school? (His black male classmates are convinced they would all “get girls” if they were white)
Why does the school perceive Seun as unprepared? (His mom swears he is organized and motivated at home)
What are Seun and Idris ‘missing out on’ by attending Dalton?
Seun – who struggled to connect with other kids socially and had his fair share of academic troubles at Dalton – decides to leave after eighth grade and go to a predominantly black high school in Brooklyn.
http://thegrio.com/2013/10/13/american-promise-doc-focuses-on-the-education-of-black-boys/
http://youtu.be/knFReWtLkgc
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/10/13/171859/59
A STARZ Original Miniseries Event: Premieres October 19 at 10pm ET/PT
Set in London during the early 1930s, the STARZ Original Miniseries
Event “Dancing on the Edge” follows a group of Black jazz musicians, the Louis Lester Band, as they begin to rise to stardom as a result of
performing at various elite social gatherings hosted by London’s
aristocratic society. Although Britain’s climate was undergoing
extraordinary social change, much of the upper-class loathed the idea of Black musicians performing in polite society.
Still, the city’s more
progressive socialites (including members of the Royal Household) took
the band under their wing. The blissful eminence surrounding the band
abruptly changes when the band members are entangled in a murder
conspiracy. The five-episode Original miniseries stars Golden Globe® nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor (Twelve Years of a Slave–releasing in October 2013, Salt, American Gangster) as the debonair band leader of his self-titled “Louis Lester Band,” who befriends an ambitious music journalist named Stanley, played by co-star Matthew Goode (Stoker, A Single Man, Brideshead Revisited). Ejiofor and Goode are joined by Emmy® and Golden Globe® Award nominee Jacqueline Bisset (Joan of Arc, Two Jacks) who plays the influential Lady Cremone, along with Emmy® and Golden Globe® Award winner John Goodman (The Monuments Men, Inside Llewyn Davis-both set to release in December 2013, Monster’s University) who portrays the affluent American entrepreneur named Masterson.
http://www.starz.com/originals/dancingontheedge/about
EXTORTION UPDATE: WHY REID SAID NO TO MCCONNELL
By Jonathan Cohn
——————————————–
But Democratic leaders haven’t been changing the terms of the deal. On the contrary, Obama, Reid, and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi have been remarkably consistent—over time and with one another. The Democrats are happy to negotiate over fiscal policy, they say. But they won’t allow Republicans to gain extra leverage by refusing to fund the government or increase the Treasury’s borrowing authority. As far as the Democrats are concerned, those tactics amount to extortion. Allowing Republicans to succeed, they say, would be even worse than shuttering the government or allowing a default—even though the former has been plenty bad and the latter would be even worse.
This doesn’t mean negotiations have ended. On the contrary, Reid and McConnell are still talking. Those talks will probably be the basis of whatever agreement ends this crisis. But Democrats have established a pretty simple test for new proposals: Is it a deal Democrats would make in normal circumstances, without a shutdown and without the threat of default? So far, nothing Republicans have suggested comes close to meeting that criteria.
————————————————–
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115168/reid-rejects-mcconnell-says-no-concessions-avoid-shutdown-default
Having a discussion over at POU about Jefferson Davis being married to a Black woman.
Now, take a look at the pics….they scream Sista to me…how about you?
How racism caused the shutdown:
from MHP’s show
Part 1
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/mhp/53270417#53270465
Part 2
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/mhp/53270417#53270549
Lee Fang @lhfang
Waving a Confederate flag at the home of a black family isn’t okay anywhere. It’s a threat of violence.
2:52 PM – 13 Oct 2013
Mark Harris @MarkHarrisNYC
Confederate flags flying outside the White House and protesters yelling “Go home!” Proud moment for you, GOP.
2:25 PM – 13 Oct 2013
Roger Simon ✔ @politicoroger
Racism comes out of closet (as if it were ever in) as protesters hoist Confederate flag outside WH today.
1:44 PM – 13 Oct 2013
I’ve seen pictures of this today. My God, there are no words for these grotesque, repulsive and hopelessly stupid, pathetic people. I just wonder how many like them are out there.
To the Racists in our Country
Why hold back on being decent and kind
So much needs repair; so much needs cleaning up
Hearts and souls are going down the drain
Through stubborn adherence to racism and hate
Evil has enslaved the racist
Hate has shackled the bigot
Missed chances
Missed opportunities
To denounce the sins
To toss the imagined fear
To scrape off the denial
No freedom for the close minded
No liberation for the falsely superior
Just crumbling into empty souls
John Boehner’s only choice: Throw the Tea Party overboard
By Greg Sargent
October 13 at 10:15 am
With House Republicans devolving into utter chaos, the prospects for any kind of deal to end the crisis has shifted over to the Senate, where Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell continue to negotiate over the terms of ending the government shutdown and lifting the debt ceiling. Senators had coalesced around a plan pushed by Susan Collins that would increase the debt limit into January and fund the government for six months, albeit at sequester levels, while delaying the medical device tax for two years.
Reid is insisting new revenues, and a higher spending level, must be part of these talks. After all, this Collins “compromise” contains zero concessions by Republicans, and only concessions by Dems. The Collins plan continues to define lifting the debt limit and funding the government at sequester levels as concessions by Republicans, but those are both outcomes Republicans want. John Boehner flatly admitted in March the debt limit must and will be raised to preserve the full faith and credit of the U.S. And funding the government at sequester levels for six months is a concession by Democrats to what Republicans themselves have described as a victory for them.
What’s really telling, though, is that House Republicans are furious at this emerging plan, explicitly because they think it requires them to give up the debt ceiling as leverage to force major Dem concessions on Obamacare. Buried in the Post’s account is this important anecdote describing Paul Ryan’s reaction to the Collins plan:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/13/john-boehners-only-choice-throw-the-tea-party-overboard/
Nerdy Wonka @NerdyWonka
That moment the GOP proudly hold the Confederate flag (a banner of racism & slavery) outside the Black POTUS’s home.
1:50 PM – 13 Oct 2013
Nerdy Wonka @NerdyWonka
Yes Republicans, waving a Confederate flag outside the Black President’s home is a great way to convince America that you’re not racist.
1:58 PM – 13 Oct 2013
Jeffrey Goldberg ✔ @JeffreyGoldberg
In many parts of America, waving a Confederate flag outside the home of a black family would be considered a very hostile act.
1:48 PM – 13 Oct 2013
The Shady Trick Justice Scalia Plans To Use To Inject Even More Big Money Into Elections
By Ian Millhiser on October 8, 2013 at 1:49 pm
The Supreme Court’s consideration Tuesday of a bid by the Republican National Committee to make it easier for wealthy individuals to influence elections fixated on a series of related hypotheticals, all involving schemes enabling the very rich to lavish money on their favorite party or candidates. In Justice Elena Kagan’s version, activists set up literally hundreds of shell organizations, each of which promises to work to elect like-minded candidates in the five most contested U.S. Senate races. A donor then makes a maximum-dollar donation to each of these shell groups, effectively laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars to each of these five grateful candidates. Thus, although federal law bans massive dollar donations to individual candidates in order to prevent corruption, Kagan’s hypothetical offers a way around that law.
And if the Supreme Court gives the GOP what it is asking for, this money laundering scheme will almost certainly be legal.
The specific issue in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (a businessman named Shaun McCutcheon is also a plaintiff in the case, along with the RNC) is whether two limits on how much money wealthy individuals can give to parties and candidates will survive contact with the conservative Roberts Court. Current law limits the amount rich donors can give to individual candidates (currently, $2,600) as well as the amount that they can give to party organizations. Additionally, the law also limits how much the wealthy can give altogether to all candidates and to all party groups. Presently, these limits are $48,600 to candidates and $74,600 to PACs and party committees — for a total cap of $123,200. McCutcheon and the RNC challenge these final two caps. So they want people who have already given more than a hundred thousand dollars to Republican candidates and to GOP groups to be allowed to donate even more.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/08/2750331/the-shady-trick-justice-scalia-plans-to-use-to-inject-even-more-big-money-into-elections/
How Racism Caused The Shutdown
By Zack Beauchamp on October 9, 2013 at 9:00 am
This isn’t an article about how Republicans shut down the government because they hate that the President is black. This is an article about how racism caused the government to shut down and the U.S. to teeter on the brink of an unprecedented and catastrophic default.
I understand if you’re confused. A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.
The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits.
How The New Deal Drove The Racists Out
In 1938, Sen. Josiah W. Bailey (D-NC) filibustered his own party’s bill. Well, part of his party — Northern Democrats, together with Northern Republicans, were pushing an federal anti-lynching bill. Bailey promised that Southern Democrats would teach “a lesson which no political party will ever again forget” to their Northern co-partisans if they “come down to North Carolina and try to impose your will upon us about the Negro:”
Just as when the Republicans in the [1860s] undertook to impose the national will upon us with respect to the Negro, we resented it and hated that party with a hatred that has outlasted generations; we hated it beyond measure; we hated it more than was right for us and more than was just; we hated it because of what it had done to us, because of the wrong it undertook to put upon us; and just as that same policy destroyed the hope of the Republican party in the South, that same policy adopted by the Democratic party will destroy the Democratic party in the South.
Bailey’s rage at the affront to white supremacy was born of surprise. Until 1932, the South had dominated the Democratic Party, which had consistently stood for the South’s key regional regional interest — keeping blacks in literal or figurative fetters — since before the Civil War.
But the Depression-caused backlash against Republican incumbents that swept New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and a vast Democratic majority into Congress also made Southerners a minority in the party for the first time in its history. The South still controlled the most influential committee leadership votes in Congress, exercising a “Southern Veto” on race policy. The veto forced FDR to stay out of the anti-lynching fight (“If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, [the southerners] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing,” he lamented).
The veto also injected racism into the New Deal. Social Security was “established on a racially invidious, albeit officially race-neutral, basis by excluding from coverage agricultural and domestic workers, the categories that included nearly 90 percent of black workers at the time,” University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. wrote in The Nation. “Others, like the [Civilian Conservation Corps], operated on Jim Crow principles. Roosevelt’s housing policy put the weight of federal support behind creating and reproducing an overtly racially exclusive residential housing industry.”
Yet, Reed notes, the New Deal not only benefited blacks, but brought them to a position of power in the Democratic Party. “The Social Security exclusions were overturned, and black people did participate in the WPA, Federal Writers’ Project, CCC and other classic New Deal initiatives, as well as federal income relief,” he reminds us. “Black Americans’ emergence as a significant constituency in the Democratic electoral coalition helped to alter the party’s center of gravity and was one of the factors–as was black presence in the union movement–contributing to the success of the postwar civil rights insurgency.”
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/09/2730651/how-racism-caused-the-shutdown/
a comment from TOD:
http://theobamadiary.com/2013/10/13/rise-and-shine-the-week-in-photos-videos-a-word-or-two/
Krugman lectures Noonan on GOP hostage taking: ‘Nothing like this ever happened before’
By David Edwards
Sunday, October 13, 2013 12:33 EDT
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Sunday shot down Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s argument that the Republican Party’s tactic of shutting down the government and refusing to raise the debt ceiling was “business as usual.”
During panel discussion on ABC’s This Week, former White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe noted that he was “deeply concerned” that tea party Republicans in the House did not even have the capability to open the government or raise the debt ceiling before the Oct. 17 deadline.
“Republicans made a mistake, they picked a fight, they had no strategy, they had no endgame, they had no plan,” Noonan agreed. “That having been said, I think the president has made counter mistakes, not only in the famous stories of the things that were forcibly shut down in the shutdown and all that stuff, but his — the sense he has communicated that, ‘Hey, I’m not having a conversation, we’re not having negotiations.’ Presidents have to negotiate on debt limits. They have to own it.
We have all worked in White Houses, we’ve seen presidents do this,” she added. “You can call what the other side does to you extortion. What it really is, is an argument and a deal. And at the end, you trade some horses and do your best.”
“That never happened,” Krugman shot back. “Nothing like this has ever happened before. All of the the alleged former examples, if you actually look at them, they turn out to be either — there was a budget deal that included a debt ceiling raise but the debt ceiling was not a hostage. Or once — once — [former Speaker] Tip O’Neill held up the debt ceiling for one day more as symbolism.”
“There was never before a case where one party pushed the U.S. government to the edge of default demanding concessions in return,” the New York Times columnist insisted. “So, every attempt to make this sound like business as usual, it’s not. This is something completely out of the previous experience.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/13/krugman-lectures-noonan-on-gop-hostage-taking-nothing-like-this-ever-happened-before/
CNN host calls out Politico reporter who says fact checking isn’t her job: ‘You ignore that?’
By David Edwards
Sunday, October 13, 2013 14:57 EDT
Politico reporter Ginger Gibson shocked CNN guest media critic Frank Sesno on Sunday when she said that she didn’t bother to check facts if she was told that her sources were not telling the truth.
During a segment about the increasing role of fact checking organizations like PolitiFact, Sesno asked Gibson how members of Congress responded when they got a “pants on fire” rating.
“Their press secretaries, when it’s the other guy who’s called out, will blast out those as a press release,” Gibson explained
“And what do you do with that?” Sesno wondered.
“Most of the time, ignore them,” Gibson admitted.
“You ignore it!” Sesno exclaimed. “Wait, wait, wait. So if someone is called a liar or is exposed in a fact check and you’re the reporter of it, you ignore that?”
“Well, we ignore it when it becomes political fighting, right?” Gibson said.
“But if someone is objectively wrong,” Sesno pressed.
“As a reporter who covered the [Romney] campaign and covers the Hill now, these fact checks are great for us because sometimes when the claim keeps getting repeated, we can point to them in a story and say, look, they’ve been deemed untrue by multiple fact checkers,” Gibson insisted. “And I think that line is important, the multiple fact checkers. When it’s multiple fact checkers agreeing, we can go to that.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/13/cnn-host-calls-out-politico-reporter-who-says-fact-checking-isnt-her-job-you-ignore-that/
Philly cops recorded in racially-abusive stop-and-frisk: ‘All you do is weaken the f—ing country’
By George Chidi
Saturday, October 12, 2013 19:40 ED
A video of two Philadelphia police officers racially abusing two pedestrians in a stop-and-frisk went viral Friday, drawing attention to problems with out of control cops from local media.
Officer Philip Nace and another officer from the city’s 25th District can be seen in the video, dated Sept. 27, as they stop two unidentified men, according to reports from the Philadelphia Daily News. The two officers stopped the men after one of the men said hi to another pedestrian in the North Philadelphia neighborhood.
“You don’t say ‘Hi’ to strangers,” Nace told him. “Not in this neighborhood,” his partner added.
During the 16-minute recording, Nace told one of the men: “We don’t want you here, anyway. All you do is weaken the f—ing country.”
“How do I weaken the country? By working?” the man asked.
“No, freeloading,” Nace replied.
Watch the complete video below
http://youtu.be/G4exZ-jXgWE
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/12/philly-cops-recorded-in-racially-abusive-stop-and-frisk-all-you-do-is-weaken-the-f-ing-country/
What Kentucky’s Obamacare Success Might Mean in 2014
By John Tozzi October 08, 2013
If you want to see how the success or failure of the Affordable Care Act might shape the nation’s future electoral battles, watch Kentucky.
The state’s health-insurance exchange, Kynect, stood out for having worked smoothly in the week after most other marketplaces opened around the country with glitches and delays. The Bluegrass State happens to be home to two Republicans who serve as some of Obamacare’s biggest foes in the U.S. Senate: Mitch McConnell, the minority leader up for reelection next year, and Rand Paul, the libertarian Tea Party ally eying a run for the White House.
Behind Kentucky’s exchange is Governor Steve Beshear, a second-term Democrat who decided to build the exchange over the objections of state Republicans. Beshear argued in a New York Times op-ed last month that Kentucky’s “horrendous” health status meant the state urgently needed the Affordable Care Act to help expand insurance coverage to 600,000 people. He also took a jab at “naysayers” who “pour time, money and energy into overturning or defunding the Affordable Care Act.” McConnell and Paul hit back last week, writing in their own op-ed, “Obamacare might sell in New York, but Kentuckians aren’t buying it.”
The problem for the Republicans, though, is that Kentuckians are buying it—in fact, the Kentucky exchange has, so far, enrolled more patients than any other. By Monday afternoon, 6,946 families had enrolled in plans through Kynect and the website had handled 3.1 million page views, according to the governor’s office. Soon after the launch, Beshear was talking to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, making the red-state governor a visible public face of Obamacare.
Kentuckians aren’t particularly ideological, says Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky. Despite Rand Paul’s Tea Party ties, Voss says, the conservative movement hasn’t been strong in the state, and most voters are practical. “Moderate, technocratic Democrats have done very well here, and will continue to do so,” he says. Registered Democrats actually outnumber Republicans in the state, but Kentucky has gone red in every presidential race since 2000.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-08/what-kentuckys-obamacare-success-might-mean-in-2014#r=pol-ls
The Boxer and the Baller: Reid and Obama’s Unlikely Bond
The relationship between the Senate majority leader and the president helps explain why Democrats have been so unified during the shutdown fight.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment about Barack Obama’s presidency has been his failure to build on relationships forged when he was a member of the Senate. In his fifth year in office, his legislative agenda has benefited little from his four years spent with other lawmakers in the Senate gym, at committee hearings, and on overseas trips. Almost forgotten is how high the hopes were when Obama became only the third president elevated to the Oval Office directly from a Senate seat, following Warren Harding and John Kennedy.
On Inauguration Day 2009, there was talk of friendships that crossed the aisle. Ninety-one of the senators had served with Obama. Today, after five years of struggle to push his agenda, the Senate stands as the Democratic bulwark on Capitol Hill against a hostile Republican House. But the hopes that the president could gain from personal ties dissipated almost as fast as his comrades fled Washington. Historic turnover means that almost half of today’s senators never served with Obama, 45 having been elected since he moved down Pennsylvania Avenue.
But today’s budget battle brings into surprising focus the one personal relationship formed when he was a senator that has endured and is key to understanding the president’s stance on the government shutdown and the showdown over the debt ceiling. The fight has cast a bright spotlight on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. While Vice President Joe Biden was the deal-maker in the last budget showdown, this time it is the pugnacious Reid who is calling the shots on the Democratic strategy to rebuff Republican calls for negotiation.
Without a doubt, the Obama-Reid pairing is an unlikely one—the president who always tries to avoid fights and the senator who always seems to look for them. Certainly, no one talked on that Inauguration Day about an Obama-Reid friendship. The two men are just so different in age, life experiences, and personality. But inside the Obama White House, they fully understand that the success of Obama’s second term may well be determined by the Nevada Democrat who has been majority leader since 2007. “They really are of the same mind on the major issues,” a senior White House official tells National Journal. “We are closer today than at any time in decades through different presidents and different majority leaders.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-boxer-and-the-baller-reid-and-obama-s-unlikely-bond-20131010
The racists republican tea party protesters are waving confederate flags at the White House but tomorrow morning PBO will still be President. Hateful racists bigots!
This video, “Intuitively Obvious”, is a result of several meetings that took place on MIT’s campus in 2012 by the group that call themselves loosely “The Committee on Racial Enlightenment”
http://blackhistory.mit.edu/race/intuitively-obvious-vol-1/
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Did any Republicans sign?
“THE JOURNEY”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=W-0v9Ns-HpA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HAHUhjcowHU
“Black women’s lives showcased in ‘A Mile In My Shoes’ ”
by Nikki Tundel, Minnesota Public Radio
October 9, 2013
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2013/10/08/arts/plaster-shoes-black-women
For those of you who might be missing all of the posting on the Kendrick Johnson case, here is the link to the 3ChicsPolitico article:
http://3chicspolitico.com/2013/05/01/what-happened-to-kendrick-johnson-who-killed-him/
Please consider signing the petition for Kendrick Johnson and also posting it to your blogs, emails, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. We need to get word out that this petition exists. We need Justice for Kendrick Johnson.
Here is the petition:
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/kendrick-johnson-death
Also, please post this petition to your local NAACP sites, OCCUPY sites, and any blogs that you comment at.
Thank you!
Good Morning Everybody!
Ametia, Marvin Gaye’s singing of “His Eye Is On the Sparrow” is so beautifully moving!
Thank you for this.
Happy Sunday, Yahtc & everyone!
Psalm 34:8
Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
Edwin Hawkins and The Music and Art Seminar Mass Choir “Taste And See” The Mass Choir (1984)
Thank you, Yahtc!
http://www.tributetoblackwomen.com/poems/lifesong.htm
Good Morning, Everyone! :-))